“Thus, it should be understood that when pro-US figures use the term, 'rules-based international order,' they are not referring to anything analogous to the rule of law. Quite the opposite, they are using Orwellian language to describe a system in which essentially no rules can be established and/or observed, given that the dominant state has the prerogative to violate and/or rewrite “rules” at its whim.” Aaron Good, American Exception
“Psychopathic workers very often were identified as the source of departmental conflicts, in many cases, purposely setting people up in conflict with each other. The most debilitating characteristic of even the most well-behaved psychopath is the inability to form a workable team."
Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, Snakes in Suits
"What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing— that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence.
The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to perish. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all failure and weakness — Christianity."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"I’m not against business, or profits, or becoming wealthy. I have no problem with people becoming billionaires—if they got there by winning a fair race, if their accomplishments merit it, if they pay their fair share of taxes, and if they don’t corrupt their society. But that’s not how most of the people mentioned in this book became wealthy.
Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful. That’s what I have a problem with. And I think most people agree with me."
Charles Ferguson
Satan and his Antichrist
"Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament. Certainly, he has no choice. He has chosen to have no choice. He has wished to ‘be himself,’ and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted. To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."
C. S. Lewis
Stocks wobbled a bit today, while the US Dollar gained.
Gold was off, falling back towards the lower bound of its symmetrical triangle.
Silver managed to add a bit to its recent stealth rally.
There will be a stock option expiration for July this Friday.
Shenanigans are underway, as is usual in our perversely bent financial system.
There was intraday commentary here about the early 20th century program in Germany to kill the elderly, the infirm, the depressed, the mentally and physically disabled, the dissident, homosexuals, and the homeless for the sake of reducing costs and increasing profits.
Don't turn away again and move on.
Look, and see what The Market demands, what its predators, narcissists, and infantile sociopaths promote, and what you too, in the end, may become.
"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.
The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps."
Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin
“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
Power is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the latter it crushes, the former it intoxicates. The truth is, no one really possesses it."
Simone Weil
"As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags. There was a time when people spoke, at least occasionally, of 'inherent worth'— if not of things, then at least of persons.
It is sometimes said that since everything is for sale under the rule of The Market, nothing is sacred. Does anyone doubt that if the True Cross were ever really discovered, it would eventually find its way to Sotheby's? The Market is not omnipotent— yet. But the process is under way and it is gaining momentum."
Harvey Cox, The Market as God
"The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all.
The struggle for the daily livelihood leaves behind in the ruck everything that is weak or diseased or wavering; while the fight of the male to possess the female gives to the strongest the right, or at least, the possibility to propagate its kind. And this struggle is a means of furthering the health and powers of resistance in the species. Thus it is one of the causes underlying the process of development towards a higher quality of being.
Since the inferior always outnumber the superior, the former would always increase more rapidly if they possessed the same capacities for survival and for the procreation of their kind; and the final consequence would be that the best in quality would be forced to recede into the background. Therefore a corrective measure in favour of the better quality must intervene. Nature supplies this by establishing rigorous conditions of life to which the weaker will have to submit and will thereby be numerically restricted; but even that portion which survives cannot indiscriminately multiply, for here a new and rigorous selection takes place, according to strength and health."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of The Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see."
Thomas Merton
“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life.
But now we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged.”
Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism
Most people are unaware or simply overlook the actions of the German government that began in 1939, in which the State, with the active cooperation of the medical and legal professions, began the systematic murder of people who were physically and mentally inferior, undesirable and a drain on resources better used by the superior ones, at least according to the harsh but necessary judgement of the State.
It was this decision, and its willing acceptance by the thought leaders and intellectuals of the day, along with the sociopaths of all classes, in defining who had the right to live based on their ability to serve the State according to its needs, that laid the groundwork for the death of compassion, and the murder of over ten million people.
Once the State has the power to say who is or is not a worthy human being, no one is safe. The mentally and physically disabled, the depressed, the vagrants, the elderly, those of mixed races, homosexuals, and those who irritate the powerful.
We do not often hear about Aktion T4, the euthanasia program, because the weakest have little or no constituency, and are sometimes overlooked because others think that their own causes, or their own pain, is more significant than the least of these.
It was the professional class, the doctors and the lawyers, who willingly sanctioned the murder of the innocents in Germany. And for that great crime against God and Man, which almost no one protested against, the country was brought low and laid to ruin.
It is a terrible trap to think that we today are so different, so exceptional, that we are not capable of permitting the same thing to happen all over again. After all, we are only doing what is necessary, what is required by The Market, backed up by made up statistics and clever propaganda designed to make the reasonably successful feel superior to the unfortunate.
And to make the unfortunate, the different, and the others appear to be vermin to be controlled and then exterminated, as an unjust economic drain on the nation.
They sanctify the rich, no matter how they made their fortunes, and demonize the unfornate, no matter what the cause of their poverty, which is the law of the god of the darkness of this world.
And this is how the madness begins. Look, don't turn away. See what you are becoming.
In their desire to escape the pain and complexity of being human, men can make themselves into beasts, one step at a time. And then there is hell on earth.
Aktion T4 was the name used after World War II for Germany's "Euthanasia programme" during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination".
The programme officially ran from September 1939 until August 1941, but continued unofficially until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.
During the official stage of Action T4, 70,273 people were killed, but the Nuremberg Trials found evidence that German and Austrian physicians continued the murder of patients after October 1941 and that about 275,000 people were killed under T4.
More recent research based on files recovered after 1990 gives a figure of at least 200,000 physically or mentally handicapped people killed by medication, starvation, or in the gas chambers between 1939 and 1945.
The name T4 was an abbreviation of "Tiergartenstraße 4", the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, bearing the euphemistic name literally translating into English as Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care.
This body operated under the direction of Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's private chancellery, and Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician. This villa no longer exists, but a plaque set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location.
This dialogue is taken from the transcripts of Sophie Scholl's interrogation, before she was tried and executed for her dissent and act of conscience in 1943 in Munich.
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.
What is called 'fellow traveling' (collaboration) was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."
"To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: 'inverted totalitarianism,' a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on “private media” than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.
It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison — 751 per 100,000 people — of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has 'emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation’s political traditions.'
The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization [and deregulation].
Chalmers Johnson, Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled
“Be the person that your dog thinks you are.”
George Eliot aka Mary Ann Evans
This is what they call the 'dog days' of summer market trading.
Even the spokesmodels pom-poms were drooping today along with volumes, although they did manage a 'new highs' exclamation after the close.
And yes, stocks were marginally higher on light volumes.
Gold and silver were pretty much unchanged as the Dollar and Bonds moved a tad higher.
What is the old saying of Jesse Livermore? 'Never short a dull market.'
Citibank turned in lackluster results today, with profits based largely on one timers and cost cutting. The banking sector was a drag all day, although Citi managed to gain some ground finally. Go figure.
Gold continues to wind within a symmetrical triangle. Stocks continue to drift higher on lazy algo pumping.
The darkness continues to spread and gain force, as the unspeakable slowly becomes customary, and then finally acceptable. If you to wish to never see that madness again, then wehret den anfängen, stop it in the beginning.
I have included two charts immediately below that suggest that a global recession is on the horizon.
I was busy with people working here all day. I really don't like to have anyone come over and do these things, but sometimes you just have to do it.
I had not expected them to come today, but they called early this morning and said they had a cancellation so would I like to have them come over. It was ok with me. I like to get these things done and over.
But besides directing traffic, I did manage to keep busy with many little things that have been on my 'to do' list, now that most of the big things have been done.
But as you well know, when working outside in this kind of heat and humidity it does not take long before the thought of an ice cold glass of tonic water and lime on ice becomes an almost irresistible attraction.
Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
"Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one (I would in 2019 now say either) party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.
That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents."
Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism
"The truth is that we were so spiritually and morally bankrupt that we could not even see some of those lines: we stepped over them blindly. Other times we saw the lines alright, but we wanted to cross them... It wasn’t God who was dead. We were."
Ray A., Practice These Principles
“Oh where is the noble face of modesty, or the strength of virtue, now that blasphemy is in power and men have put justice behind them, and there is no law but lawlessness, and none act with fear of the gods?”
Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis
“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life.
But now we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged.”
Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism
Not to put too fine a point on it, we are a people addicted to greed, pride, and power. And like all who have been caught in such a devilish web, we are going to end this, badly.
Stocks rose to new highs, based on the pandering of the Federal Reserve to the moneyed interests.
It is, after all, the fashionable thing to do, since everyone who is anyone is doing it, from the liar-in-chief to the lowest creatures of the beltway and the corporate media. En vogue.
Fed Chair Powell now owns this latest asset bubble, to the same extent that his predecessors going back to Greenspan at least owned theirs.
I would not put all the blame on the Fed, although the wiseguys are likely to pick them as the scapegoats.
I think we are long past the time when illusions could be dismissed as wishful thinking or as acts of naive desperation. Men truly go mad in herds, and come to their senses slowly, one at a time. And some, in their stubborn pride, never will.
There is little doubt in my mind that US stocks are forming a blow off top. The timing is going to be problematic as it always is.
What will trigger the next decline? Likely candidates are the FOMC meeting when they cut the interest rate, and the Street sells the news.
Or the upcoming earnings season, which begins next week, and the many surprises and realities that will be coming out of the dark.
Or some exogenous international event, political or economic, that sends the algos scurrying towards the exits.
But, while the music continues, the financiers and their creatures will keep dancing. For who could have seen it, whatever it is, coming?
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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